Virgin Media’s “Superhub” with your own router [Tomato]

This week I upgraded my Virgin connection from 20 -> 30 Mb, the extra speed boost is great but unfortunately, this meant that I had to have the new (no so) Superhub; a modem + router combination. This, quite frankly, has to be the worse piece of network kit I’ve ever seen. It’s continuously dropping, terrible WI-FI speeds and top top it off, you can get bypass it as, at the moment, it cannot act as just a modem.

In order to get it to play ball with my super Tomato-based router, it took hours of fiddling and a few factory resets but, here are the instructions. This won’t turn it into a modem but will allow all the work on the network to be done by another router, the Superhub just handling the internet traffic.

  1. Plug the Superhub (LAN port) into the existing router’s WAN port – it has to be into the WAN one!
  2. Plug the cable into existing router [assuming 192.168.1.1] and jot down it’s WAN port MAC address (in Tomato this is Advanced -> MAC address -> WAN port)
  3. Plug the cable into Superhub [assuming 192.168.0.1], log in, and turn everything off you can find. Wireless, services, UPNP etc. but leave DHCP on.
  4. Assign the WAN MAC address you’ve jotted down to 192.168.0.20 via the static DHCP setting.
  5. Enable the DMZ and put in 192.168.0.20. This will forward everything your Superhub gets to your existing router, letting that handle all the security and port forwarding.
  6. Turn everything off, wait 15 seconds and turn it all back on again.
  7. Plug yourself into the existing router and, unless I’ve missed anything, port forwarding and internet will all work fine.

The gotcha’s for me are that the Superhub and the existing router need to be on different x subnets (192.168.x.y) and the WAN IP address of the existing router needs to be assigned via the Superhub’s DHCP – the DMZ won’t work if you assign it statically.

Also, if you’re like me and use an external domain name to resolve internal server’s IP addresses, using the Advanced -> Firewall -> won’t work by itself due to the way the external IPs are handled. You will need to enable this setting and create a custom DNS entry to route your custom domain back to your “external” IP address in order for it to be picked by by the routing tables.

Go to Advanced -> DCHP/DNS and enter the following in Dnsmasq box

local-ttl=1
address=/mysubdomain.mydomain.com/192.168.0.20

Lets hope Virgin pull their finger out and release the next firmware update for bridge mode (beta update).

Categorized: Geeky
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5 comments on “Virgin Media’s “Superhub” with your own router [Tomato]

  1. Howdy this is kinda of off topic but I was wondering if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or if you have to manually code with HTML. I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding knowledge so I wanted to get advice from someone with experience. Any help would be enormously appreciated!

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